EU Court Rules In Favour Of Digital Download Resale

With digital distribution seemingly regarded as the future of gaming, one might wonder whether this is just another salvo in the ongoing war publishers have been waging on the gaming resale market. After all, if you buy a game digitally, though you can download it as much as you want, you cannot sell it to anyone thereafter.

Now the European Union’s Court of Justice has ruled that consumers have a right to resell digitally distributed games, stating that companies dissolve their claim in a product as soon as they’ve taken money for it. This effectively kills the sumpsimus of publishers, who insist that they sell only the license to use their game and not the actual ownership of the game.

“An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet,” said the court. “… Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership of the copy. Therefore, even if the licence prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.”

What’s great is that the ruling applies to all software, not just games. Looking at you, Photoshop users.

Once again, this overrules a publisher’s End User License Agreement which means that no matter what the small print might say, if you as the consumer wish to sell your games, you are entitled to do just that. You own the actual product, as opposed to just the license to use it.

In truth, with services such as Steam and Origin crafted the way they have been crafted, this ruling is more of a moral victory than anything tangible since there is no way to really resell digital games, but it’s still a gigantic “fuck you” to those nasty publisher executives who try to deny you what is rightfully yours.